12 Tags of 2015 - April

Hi Everyone

Today I am posting my tag for April - can you believe we are a third of the way through the year already?!

As usual I am getting to my tag late so I will post the photos today and the tutorial tomorrow or Friday depending on upload times!  At least if I post the photos today I can actually join in the challenge!

For those of you new to my blog I thought I would explain what this tag challenge is all about.  Each month I play along with the Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2015 challenge which you can see if you follow this link.  Anyone who wants to play along can do so and we all link up over on Tim's blog.  On the first of every month Mr Holtz publishes a tag to inspire us.  There are always detailed photo instructions of how he made his tag and that always involves interesting techniques for us to try.  There are always lots of lovely products to see so plenty of inspiration every month…..oh and there are prizes to be won too!!!

Then it is over to you/us.  If you are a beginner you may wish to mimic Tim's tag and try out new techniques but nine times out of ten we don't have all that Tim has used so that is the fun part of the challenge.  That is our chance to give our tags our own unique twists.

From Tim's Inspiration to our Interpretation.  When you look at the tags of all the people that join in each month you will see the variety of tag designs Tim's original tag inspires.

I have been playing along for 3 years now and I love to see where the journey takes me - sometimes you can instantly recognise the original inspiration and you will definitely see that this month but other months you would have to look hard to see the elements I have taken from the original tag.

So without further ado here are my April tags and of course the matching 3" sample square.

One of this months techniques was using water colour paper and water colouring techniques.  You will see my colouring is a bit more vibrant than Tim's and if you watch my tutorial you will see how I achieved the look using both my Distress Inks and Distress Stains.

I decided to add a little decoupage element to my flowers and used my ink pads to create the two tone ribbon to match my project.  Tim used his Distress Markers to create an ombre effect on his ribbon and as I don't have many Distress Markers I did things a little differently.

Here is a close up of the sampler square:

I have four little squares now so I thought I would show you just how each month takes you in a totally different crafting direction.

I am looking forward to seeing what the whole sampler looks like when I frame it at the end of the year.

So I hope I have encouraged a few newbies to play along with this fab challenge.  Click on this link if you want to see all the different tags Tim has inspired with his April Tag.

I will post the tutorial of how I got from Tim's inspiration to my interpretation tomorrow - YouTube willing!!! ;-)

Thank you for popping by x